India to play an important role in AI research: Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun

India will have an important role to play in the future of artificial intelligence (AI) research and development, Meta’s Chief AI scientist Yann LeCun said at Meta’s Build with AI Summit.

The AI pioneer said the country’s potential lies not only in technology and product innovation for local markets but also on an international scale.

“There is a lot of talent in India. We see a lot of people from India making technical and scientific contributions to AI. India, going forward, has an important role to play, not just in technology development and product development, not just for local products or international products, but also for research,” LeCun said. 

He highlighted the critical importance of open-source platforms in the evolution of AI, where open-source frameworks have allowed developers worldwide to access and improve their AI systems, opening doors to several collaborations. 

“Open source is not just important today, but it's going to become even more important in the future. It's because AI is going to become basically a common infrastructure that all of us across the world will share. We need AI systems in the future to become a kind of repository of all human knowledge,” he said.

India is projected to become the largest market for Meta AI, which currently has over 500 million monthly active users globally. By 2024-end, it is expected to become the most widely used AI assistant worldwide.

LeCun further said that a small number of companies in the US alone will not be responsible for AI development.

He explained, “AI systems will not be produced by a small number of companies on the list of the US. I think the main ones would be trained in a distributed fashion all across the world. There will be data centres everywhere; in India, in North America, in Europe, in other parts of Asia, Africa. Most of the data will remain local, and the training will be distributed.” 

However, LeCun added that building the right infrastructure and gaining government support are essential factors for India to achieve its AI ambitions. 

“There's a lot of work to do, particularly in India, for setting up computing infrastructure, training people with the required expertise, and also convincing decision-makers in government to embrace this approach,” he said. 

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LeCun also serves part-time as a Silver Professor at New York University, primarily associated with the NYU Center for Data Science and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

He was awarded the 2018 ACM Turing Award, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, for their "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing."

His research focuses on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AL), with applications in computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics. 

“AI is not going to dominate us or take over, but it's going to amplify human intelligence. There is no question that within some time, we are going to have AI systems that approach human intelligence. Those AI assistants might be eventually smarter than us, but we shouldn't feel threatened by that. We should feel empowered,” LeCun said.